EFL Teaching Materials Pragmatic Assessment

Verbal communication can be illustrated as the mutual understanding and expressive ability, and also pragmatic ability is one part of verbal communication.The aim of English course is to develop students’comprehensive language application ability. That is to say, students should master the basic knowledge of English and develop abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Gradually, they can own the ability of communicating with others as well(Curriculum Standards,2011).Textbooks of English as foreign language is an indispensable tool of improving students’pragmatic competence. However, most researches prove that most textbooks lack and omit the real pragmatic information. Vellenga’s(2004) proved that textbooks of English as foreign language obviously lack explicit pragmatic information.The essay refers to making statistics of the distribution of declaration acts, one of five speech acts. First of all, collect statistics of declaration acts in the six textbooks. Next, make a qualitative analysis in order to evaluate the amount of pragmatic information and proportion of declaration acts. Moreover, the article makes a research on English teacher’s pragmatic cognition by questionnaire. Many experts have realized the importance of combining pragmatic cognition and EFL teaching, and have contributed to the field. Pragmatic cognition is the basic of the development of pragmatic competence, and the development of cognition of pragmatic results in the improvment of pragmatic competence as well. The level of cognition of pragmatic of English teachers in the middle school has greatly impacted on that of students’. The study does some research on teachers’ cognition of pragmatic and also makes an analysis.Based on Searle’s theory, he divided declarations into ten types. The findings show that there are only four types of declarations in the six books, such as appointment,declare,name and bless while there aren’t other six types. What’s more, six books contain few sentences of declaration acts with asymmetry distribution. Also, the findings of the questionnaires show that most teachers have pragmatic awareness while few don’t. What’ the most important is that the research has a great significance to teacher’s development and compilings on textbooks, contributing to the improvement of teachers’cognition and design on textbooks.